Traineeship scheme of the European Commission
EU Commission Blue Book Traineeship
The official traineeship scheme of the European Commission, also known as the Blue Book Traineeship, is a traineeship programme providing official in-service training with the European Commission.
Aimed at young university graduates, it has been running since 1960 and is the biggest traineeship programme in the world. Traineeships, which start in October or March and last five months, are carried out in a Directorate-General or a service of the Commission, in a Commissioner's Cabinet, or in some of European Union's executive bodies and agencies. The programme is managed by a dedicated Traineeships Office within DG EAC, with an annual budget of €7 million, that runs a selection procedure to recruit approximately 600 trainees (also called Blue book stagiaires) for each traineeship period.
Selection procedure
Administrative traineeships (i.e. all traineeships except those with Directorate-General for Translation) consist of the following steps:
Application (deadline at end of January/August)
Eligibility (decision made before end of April/October)
Preselection (decision made in June/November)
Selection (decision made in July/January)
Traineeship (start in October/March)
Applicants who advance into the Selection phase are listed in a database called the (Virtual) Blue Book from which European Commission officers entitled to having a trainee are free to choose their candidates. On contacting them, the details of the traineeship are agreed upon. Approximately 2,500 candidates get into the Blue Book for every traineeship period, of whom around 650 are recruited as trainees.
As an exception, Directorate-General for Translation applies its own eligibility criteria to what are called translation traineeships, and there is no preselection. The rest of the procedure, however, is the same as for administrative traineeship.
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This entry incorporates text from “Traineeship scheme of the European Commission” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.